WH confirms frost in Hell …

Q Can you talk a little bit about this reported global warming initiative, the timing on that, and what that would entail?

MS. PERINO: Sure. I think that Steve Dinan did a pretty good job this morning of capturing where we are in terms of the discussions.

In other words, we leaked to the WashTimes as a testing the water move.

This is — I would say right now there’s no presidential statement scheduled, although that could change.

We’re trying to see how warm the Global Warming water really is and whether we can get away with this …

Just a little bit of background on this. So the President of the United States over the past several years has been working on a series of climate change initiatives.

Yes, those initiatives to help the climate change faster.

One of them last year — it was in the 2007 State of the Union, he announced the 20-in-10 program, which is to reduce traditional gasoline use; replace it — replace 20 percent of it with renewable or alternative fuels within 10 years. Congress passed that bill. It passed fairly quickly and it didn’t quite go as far and as fast as the President wanted it to. It’s more like 20 percent in 15 years. But the President was happy to sign the bill.

That darned Congress, those darn Democrats, they don’t go far enough along to help the poor President solve GW. Anyone else have a stomach turning over?

In addition to that, last June, for those of you who were there at the G8 — actually right before the G8, in May of 2007, the President of the United States had a conversation about — had a speech about moving forward to make sure that we had a post-Kyoto process, post-2012 process, which we are now entering into; and one that would include the developing nations — in particular, China and India — because if you don’t include the developing nations and their emissions continue to rise, and we ratchet ours back, basically what you do — all of the economic models show that you shift jobs from here over there, and you continue to increase emissions because they don’t have any limits, and you’ve not solved the global problem of global climate change.

That’s right, the path to undercut the UN efforts by working to get a coalition of the polluters to work for the right to pollute even more.

So we entered into the G8 last year with a major economies meeting process. This has been well received. We had the first meeting in September of 2007. There’s another meeting I think — there was a meeting in Bali with the U.N. framework convention on climate change in December 2007.

That, duh, meeting where the US was booed and where the US was isolated in the world community.

In January I think there was another meeting. And then this coming Thursday and Friday, there’s yet another major economies meeting that’s going to be hosted by President Sarkozy in France. So the conversations that this administration has been having I would characterize as ones that have been ongoing, over many years, but increasingly so since last year as we initiated the major economies process.

Gee, I just don’t understand how anyone could argue that the poor Bush Administration has not been a positive an active participant. Look at all these meetings.

So what you have now is two basic things. One, you have this major economies meeting coming up in which the President said, we all need to get to a goal by December 2008. Countries are working towards that and that — the goals would — I think the G8 this year is when they were thinking of every country being able to come forward and talk about what those goals are.

December 2008 … hmmm … is this to stick the next President with a goal set by the current Administration? Never entererd their minds, I’m sure. How about you?

In our process, we say that you can have a goal, but then for your plan, you can come up with the — with your own plan. We’re not going to ascribe how you’re going to solve the problem to other countries. They’re going to have to come up with that on their own because everyone has different fuel mixes and different economic mixes and industrial tracts.

Voluntary controls and standards work so well, don’t they? Wouldn’t you want car companies to voluntarily set safety standards?

Secondly, the other thing that you have is a regulatory train wreck with many different laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. All have, coming up soon, regulatory paths on climate change that they were never meant to deal with; the original construction of these laws were never meant to deal with them.

“Regulatory train wreck” seems almost certainly a Frank Luntz tested term. This will be the argument that we’ll be hearing, ‘we’re just working to make sure there isn’t a regulatory train wreck that keeps effective responses to Global Warming from happening’. What should we bet that this will be a regular term in the RWSM?

And so what you have coming up in June now is a legislative debate. I believe Senator Reid has scheduled the first week of June to bring up a couple of the different bills that are on the path for debate on the Senate floor.

And what the President and his team have been working towards is, one, our views on — on especially the Warner-Lieberman bill, are well known, we cannot support it. But our views on how to do this the right way are things that we are talking about. And so I think that’s what — that’s how I would characterize the conversation today.

Just like John McCain, the disastrous Lieberman-Warner makes Bush uncomfortable. That will be used as ammunition to argue that Lieberman-Warner really isn’t so bad … it is. And, we should fear that Lieberman-Warner might pass to be signed, as is, by George the W.